5 Simple Steps for an Effective Mobile App Development Strategy

Step 1: Confirming On The Idea
The goal is simple. Both the business and development teams must be on the same page.
Just a small reminder: Be sure that your product/project has a clear value proposition.

Long term vision
First, it’s necessary to write down your long term vision. This general direction helping you to choose the right technologies for development. Also, thanks to that, you will know how many dev teams you will need in the long term and what skills they should have. Will you need an iOS, Android or Web development team or all of them?

It’s important to have a plan for the functionalities and tools that you want your website or app to include, but these should be prioritized into pre-MVP and post-MVP sprints.

Middle term vision
During the creation of the middle term vision, you should take into consideration three main things:

What will you focus on in the first year?
How fast will you progress?
How do you finance the whole business and software development?
Have you already answer the questions above? Perfect!

These answers help you allocate the right amount of resources from the beginning. Most probably, the highest cost will come at the beginning of the app development. On the other hand, thanks to your long term vision, you can also start preparing the data and backend for API integrations into other mobile apps which you plan to build in the next phase.

Step 2: SKETCHING CONCEPT

Hand sketching is a fantastic way how to translate your ideas onto paper. A clear UX sketch unites the team. When everything is on paper, almost everyone in the company is able to imagine the app correctly and understand what they are trying to build.

What I personally recommend is to add short notes to explain the functionalities to the CEO or the people who do not live in the “development world”.

It is not necessary to have perfect shapes or a beautiful sketch. In this phase, it’s most important to understand how the app will work.
I always recommend working on sketches for three days. To have one day for the concept creation, then a rest day, and then evaluate the idea again. This phase is perfect for making adjustments because it costs you almost nothing in comparison to making changes in the next phases of development.

Step 3. WIREFRAMING

Wireframes are normally created by a UX designer as a template for graphic designers to add the graphic elements. Great wireframes should be much more detailed than sketches and with more screens.A UX designer should work on your wireframes and consult with the product owner to minimize misunderstandings of functionality and purpose of both mobile and website applications.

In some cases, such as smaller projects, you can skip directly from sketching to graphic design. It always depends on the quality and clarity of the sketch. Be aware that each change made in the graphic design process is more expensive than changes made during wireframing or sketching.

Step 4. DESIGNING THE GRAPHICS

The goal of a graphic designer is to catch the users attention emotionally and support their smooth user experience. Secondly, the designer’s goal is to create a visual consistency across your whole project.
It is very important is to have a font size that is legible and buttons have to be purposeful and clear as to what will happen when clicked. Create enough space between elements – especially on mobile – some people can have really huge fingers.

Step 5. CODING AND PROGRAMMING
For launching any application, I prefer to code the frontend but program only the most important parts of your MVPs.

Why? If you don’t focus too much on the programming, you can launch your app prototype much faster – and that’s the point. The faster you know the users’ reactions, the better it is for your project to begin improving…